In 2005 Dutch photographer Henriëtte van Gasteren (Sevenum 1964) - using her artist name Lilith - started playing with the image of today’s women in a cartoon-ish, humorous, super ironic and sometimes even in a painful realistic way. Lilith shows up in many complex and sometimes even contrasting appearances. In her ground-braking ‘portraits’ Lilith in fact personifies herself as well as all women. Performances in between apparent and real.

Round about the house, which functions as a continuously changing stage, she produces appearances by means of remote control and delayed action shutter, each time differently dressed and posing in another way. Like a kaleidoscopic model she embodies many archetypes and stereotypes referring to women and male thoughts about women.

Framing, lighting, choice of colour, clothes, make-up, props and backdrops merge each time into one photograph. The super inventive Lilith is, running parallel to Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Groucho Marx, at the same time far advanced inventor, poseur, encadreur, metteur-en-scène and réalisateur.

Sometimes she appears as a cheerful pin-up, a devoted mother, a playful enchantress, an athletic powergirl with a well trained hard body, a nude and stylish mannequin giving the expression ‘nine tailors go to a man’ a completely different dimension.

An overwhelming pattern-card of consciously selected alter ego’s holding up a dead sharp mirror in front of women and men in the year 2010/2011.

Lilith’s self-portraits contain double layers which are always wrapped in a stylish and a humorous manner, but when it comes to point they efficiently ‘correct’ ancient convictions.